Frank Slootman’s new mantra is “The End of No. The Beginning of Now.”  The ServiceNow CEO uses this clever phrasing to illustrate how a small change can transform IT from a bureaucracy to a service business. The key? A customer focus driven by Service Relationship Management and the capability of ServiceNow’s platform to support the needs of fourteen distinct customers (and their use cases) within the Cloud ITSM Suite. ServiceNow wants to be the "ERP of IT," a single system of record in the Cloud, inter-operating with enterprise and partner apps.

Over the past year under Slootman’s guidance, ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) has become a Wall Street darling, much as salesforce.com once was in CRM’s high-growth phase. And who can blame the Street? When sales and customer growth is as rapid, and gross margins are nearly 60 percent, can profits be that far behind?

What is Happening?  The emergence of the Boundary-free Enterprise™ is clearly reshaping what it takes to be a successful Cloud ISV.  Not only are today’s Cloud-savvy Enterprise buyers looking for new kinds of solutions that often make innovative use of Mobile, Social and Advanced Analytics, but the pace of disruptive change is demanding that Cloud ISVs rethink and refine many aspects of the core business.

This Research Alert – drawing on the Feature Presentation that Saugatuck CEO Bill McNee delivered at the SIIA’s All About the Cloud (AATC 2013) conference earlier this week – highlights the key trends framing business computing today, as well as how Enterprise buyer demand is evolving, including Cloud solution deployment preferences and timeframes.

Despite the unresolved status of Dell’s proposed leveraged buyout – still on hold after three months of market machinations from Carl Icahn and the Blackstone Group – Dell announced the acquisition of Enstratius this week.  Enstratius offers software and services to manage application provisioning and scaling, application configuration management, usage governance, and cloud utilization monitoring across public, private and hybrid Clouds. Enstratius currently supports more than twenty public and private Clouds.

Dell’s Software Division, under the management of former CA CEO John Swainson, has built an impressive portfolio of security and systems management solutions, largely through acquisition (see list below).

When Saugatuck first looked at Windows Azure – including conducting a series of interviews with System Integrator (SI) and ISV developers of over 125 Cloud solutions in the early adopter wave – it was a comparatively primitive platform positioned somewhere between IaaS and PaaS. At the time, I thought it was clever to say it was “half PaaS.”

However, times have changed, and the Windows Azure platform has matured significantly. Microsoft has relentlessly enhanced and extended its capabilities over the past five years. Today it is a fully-functioning platform with enterprise-worthy performance and a solid platform for ISVs deploying their solutions to the Cloud. To provide some idea of the extreme of processing power that Windows Azure can enable, I recommend you consider the Milliman case study.

What is Happening?  As Saugatuck has been reporting for some time now, there is an historic change underway, building on the foundations of the Cloud transition. 2012 was perhaps the most dramatic year in ISV-to-Cloud and pureplay-Cloud startup activity, and the catalyst for this was the growth of Mobile, Social and Analytics platforms driving the evolution of the Boundary-free Enterprise^TM.

Why is it Happening? We have witnessed, and continue to witness, the shift from On-premises data processing to the Cloud and Hybrid-Cloud platforms that drive SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. We know Enterprise buyers have clearly indicated their preferences for deploying these Cloud and Hybrid solutions, and there appears to be a convergence of Cloud and Hybrid Cloud into a single buying and deployment preference (See Figure 1 – Cloud, Hybrid and On-premises Deployments: Note Cloud and Hybrid Convergence).